Can PreBabel (language x) be learned easier than the language x itself?
Day twenty-four -- Can PreBabel (language x) be learned easier than the language x itself? question -- from "Trailsend" -- I'm sorry if my argument appeared hidden, tienzen. I shall attempt to clarify. Firstly, I'm a little perplexed by your wording here: quotePoint b: There is a newly discovered linguistic law -- the Law 1. Law 1: Encoding with a closed set of root words, any arbitrary vocabulary type language will be organized into a logically linked linear chain./quote The wording of the law itself seems rather imprecise. By "Encoding with a closed set of root words," do you mean: A: "Any arbitrary vocabulary type language can be encoded using any closed set of root words into a logically linked linear chain." I presume not, as that's somewhat preposterous. This would imply that using the root set {humus}, you could represent all the world's languages. Perhaps you mean: B: "There exists some closed set of root words such that any arbitrary vocabulary type language can be encoded using the set into a logically linked linear chain." That at least looks feasible, but I don't believe it holds. My arguments heretofore have been aimed at showing why. Lastly, maybe you meant: C: "For every vocabulary type language, there exists some closed set of root words such that the entire language can be encoded using the set into a logically linked linear chain." This, I think, is perfectly true, so long as you freeze the language in question. That is, at any specific instant, there certainly exists such a set of root words. (To be quite trivial, you could theoretically label every word in the language's lexicon as a root word, and then with some predicate logic and a few somersaults, you're done.) However, I don't believe such a root set would remain valid if the language were not frozen. As the language grew and interacted with its environment, the root set would not necessarily still be able to represent the entire language. In looking at your material on PreBabel and listening to you argue for the idea, I think you're banking on the fact that possibility B is true. I don't believe it is, which is why I think a "universal language" of the type you're proposing could not be constructed. Your "Case two" interpretation of my argument was more or less correct. Because different people think differently (sometimes very differently), you will not find a single root system capable of "directly" (I would use the word intuitively) representing all ideas for any given people group. Now, you would have an easier time focusing on only one language. As I've mentioned, at any given point in time, there is at least one set of words which "spans" the language--that being the trivial case of the language's entire lexicon. However, there are intricacies to every language that you would have to take into account. For example, as mentioned earlier, I did not find your encoding of the English word at to provide me with a "mental image which expresses the meaning of that word directly" at all. But then, the word at means a good many things in English. "I looked at him," vs. "I threw something at him," vs. "I studied at such-and-such university," "I left at noon," and on and on. The word "at" has many different "mental image" equivalents, depending on its context. Will you use a different encoding for each one, or will you use only one encoding and expect your learners to memorize that (dot, stop) is meant to represent "in the direction of," "at the location of," "at the time of," and all others? If you do take this approach of using only one encoding for all uses of at, then even if you did manage to represent the entire English language, you're going to have a horrible time moving from there toward a universal language. (First and foremost, because you have set the requirement that every natural language must first be encoded with your root set. With that, all hope of practicality goes out the window. But! Let us remain in the realm of the theoretical...). They would eventually, of course, figure it out. They would figure out the ways that (dot, stop) behaves differently in PB (Japanese) than it does in PB (English), and they would learn to use it appropriately. This is what we call learning a new language, and it is exactly what they would have had to do if they had simply started learning English in the first place. For this reason, I find this claim false: quoteb.2 -- Learning English (as the first language or as the second language) via PreBabel (English) is 10 times easier than the current K1 to K12 program and the current ESL program./quote From the outset, it seems dubious that you are putting a numerical quantity on difficulty. Are you measuring difficulty by the average number of hours of study required to attain fluency? Even that is not quantifiable--what is "fluent"? But for the sake of argument, I will assume that some quantifiable measure of difficulty has been agreed upon. b.2 implies that a native Japanese speaker who wishes to learn English would find the process 10 times easier if she learned English "via PreBabel (English)." So. Let the difficulty of learning English from Japanese via traditional methods be 10. The total difficulty of learning English from Japanese via PB should be 1. Step 1: Our Japanese speaker learns PreBabel (Japanese). (Difficulty X.) Step 2: Our newly-fluent PB (Japanese) speaker learns PB English. (Difficulty Y.) Step 3: Our now tri-lingual speaker learns English. (Difficulty Z.) For b.2 to be true, X + Y + Z must equal 1. But as I showed above, even learning PB (English) from PB (Japanese) would be tremendously difficult. Most likely, it would not be quite as difficult as going directly from English to Japanese, because the grammar would presumably be identical. However, learning all the reshuffling of encodings (as demonstrated with the problem of at and ?) would take a great deal of effort. This doesn't even take into account the problem of learning PB (Japanese) from Japanese in the first place. In looking at your website, it is apparent that the grammar of PB (English) is certainly not identical to the grammar of English, so I assume PB (Japanese) would not match up with Japanese either. This means that our hypothetical Japanese speaker would have to learn not only all of PB (Japanese)'s encodings of Japanese words (which would take a good deal of effort), but also a new system of grammar. With both of those together, even being very generous, I can't grant the Japanese to PB (Japanese) step any lower "difficulty measure" than 5 (measured relative to our given "difficulty" of learning English, 10). Presumably learning English from PB (English) would also be approximately 5. Now, considering that the PB (Japanese) to PB (English) step does not require learning grammar, I will give it a value of 2. Thus the total "difficulty" of learning English from Japanese via PreBabel is 5 + 5 + 2 = 12. So, it would not be 100 times easier, not 10 times easier, not even 10% easier--but 20% harder. These numbers are, of course, very rough and horribly estimated. (But I suppose any system you use for "difficulty" will be.) They are simply meant to demonstrate what I think a lot of folks who posted in this thread were concerned about. So! I hope that makes my argument clearer. Answer -- Summary of your points: 1. Why is (man, below) "foot" and not "leg"? ( an issue of arbitrariness, lacking of a precise logic) 2. I did not find your encoding of the English word "at" to provide me with a "mental image which expresses the meaning of that word directly" (an issue of intuition or intuitive logic) 3. Because different people think differently (sometimes very differently), you will not find a single root system capable of "directly" (I would use the word intuitively) representing all ideas for any given people group. (an issue of universality) Seemingly, these are three core issues which lead you to the objection on PreBabel. From them, there arose more fringe issues which are, often, muddy up the core issues. Thus, it is better to clean up those fringes first. quote="Trailsend" "I looked at him," vs. "I threw something at him," vs. "I studied at such-and-such university," "I left at noon," and on and on. The word "at" has many different "mental image" equivalents, depending on its context. Will you use a different encoding for each one, or will you use only one encoding and expect your learners to memorize that (dot, stop) is meant to represent "in the direction of," "at the location of," "at the time of," and all others? If you do take this approach of using only one encoding for all uses of at, then even if you did manage to represent the entire English language, you're going to have a horrible time moving from there toward a universal language. /quote English word is a pattern of temporally ordered sound types, and meaning of a word does not attach to particular activities, sound, marks on paper, or anything else with a definite spatiotemporal locus. The meaning of a word is agreed by a linguistic community. There is a small difference between the PreBabel (English) word and the English word. The PB (English word) does have an innate meaning. Why (a,t) = at? This is a meaningless question. Simply, it is. Why are "look at" and "study at" as they are and be different? Again, simply, they are as they are and as be different. Now, I encode PB (dot, stop) = at. Why PB (dot, stop) = at? Because, I defined it. What is the problem, about "look PB (dot, stop)" and "study PB (dot, stop)"? At this level, the PB (dot, stop) is simply a substitution for the word token "at". There is no change of any kind about "at" except a simple token substitution. If there is no benefit for this substitution, I am simply wasting my time, but no harm is done. Of course, this substitution will give some great benefits in the long run. What is the "original" meaning for "at"? Can we infer a meaning for "at" from its coding (a, t)? In addition to being an assigned word token, its meaning is hinged on its usage. On the contrary, the PB (dot, stop) does have an innate meaning, a dot stopped right here. So, for any PB word, it has three types of meaning. 1. the innate meaning: (dot, stop) means a dot stops right here. (sky, water) means water of or from sky. (above, mountain) means above the mountain. etc.. 2. the assigned meaning: (dot, stop) = at, Why? It is assigned as such. (sky, water) = rain, not cloud, not fog, etc.. (above, mountain) = sky, not air plane, not birds, etc.. 3. the semantic meaning, the meaning of its usages. at (dot, stop): look (dot, stop), study (dot, stop), ... ,(dot, stop), etc. ... Every English word does have b and c. Yet, "a" is unique from PreBabel. Is this a small and useless difference? This is the issue, here. This issue will determine that whether PreBabel is useful or not. In conclusion, the English word token (except those having root words) does not have any "internal dynamics" or an innate meaning while its life (meaning) is hinged on the "external dynamics," its usages. Yet, for PreBabel (English) word, it does have an internal dynamics while it inherits "all" the external dynamics from the English word. Perhaps, we do not see any importance about the internal dynamics of one or two words. Yet, the accumulative power of internal dynamics of every English word will change the English system completely. This is the issue which must be addressed. Question -- form "Trailsend" -- In looking at your website, it is apparent that the grammar of PB (English) is certainly not identical to the grammar of English, so I assume PB (Japanese) would not match up with Japanese either. This means that our hypothetical Japanese speaker would have to learn not only all of PB (Japanese)'s encodings of Japanese words (which would take a good deal of effort), but also a new system of grammar. Answer -- I think that you get this idea from the web page, "The PreBabel Grammar" which discusses the grammar for the PreBabel (proper). The grammar of PreBabel (Japanese) is identical to the grammar of Japanese. It is the same for the PreBabel (English), not one bit difference from the grammar of English. I repeated this point a few times in the paper "The theory and the method of constructing a true Universal Language" which outlines the foundation of PreBabel, and it can be reviewed at, http://www.prebabel.info/bab001.htm Signature -- PreBabel is the true universal language, it is available at http://www.prebabel.info